Since starting the community in 2010, LeanLA quickly became recognized as hosting the best tech meet-ups in Los Angeles. In fact, we became legendary.

The formula was simple, bring the smartest and most accomplished thought leaders in tech to LA to share their stories with you. Our guests included Eric Ries, Dave McCLure, Jason Calacanis, Steve Blank, Noah Kagan, Janice Frasier, Lane Halley, just about every local VC and many more.

Photo: @jason cracking up @ericries while pretending to be an evangelical startup preacher

Some of our most legendary events were hosted by people you never even heard of. How about Andy Johns who was on Facebook's and Twitter's early growth team and shared Facebook's secret tactics for growing the social network from 40M to 140M users? Let's just say we had to bury the video so Chamath Palihapitiya and Mark Zuckerburg wouldn't come after him.

But in 2013 our leadership team (Pete Mauro, Joe Zulli and Patrick Vlaskovits) decided it was time to drop the mic. Not a week went by where we did not get a request to restart the group. Why were so many people asking us to come back?

You told us that you wanted to be exposed to smart people without having to fly all over the world to meet them. You wanted to have meaningful, thought provoking discussions with startup leaders. You wanted to talk to experts and peers to get clarity on your business challenges. In short, you missed our badass guests who would fly in from all over the world and drop knowledge bombs.

Enough was enough, we decided that it was time to bring the group back. So here we go!